Legal aid report set for parliament

Jo Wilding will present her report ‘Droughts and Deserts. A Report on the Immigration Legal Aid Market’ in parliament on 26 June as part of an event hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Refugees.

It follows the official launch of the report at Garden Court Chambers in London on Wednesday (12 June), which will be attended by officials from: the Ministry of Justice, Legal Aid Agency, Home Office, National Audit Office, Bar Council, Law Society, Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, as well as representatives of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association and Legal Aid Practitioners Group.

Speakers include Professor Sir Ross Cranston, the retired High Court judge who chaired the Justice Working Party on immigration appeals, and Eleanor Murray, an Audit Manager at the National Audit Office who managed the NAO’s work on civil legal aid and on efficiency in the criminal justice system.

Jo’s study was born out of her PhD research at the University of Brighton. It takes its name from the varying levels of legal aid across England and Wales, including “advice deserts”, where there is no representation for refugees at all, to “advice droughts” – areas where there appears to be a supply of legal aid services but where in reality they cannot be accessed.

No previous research has examined a sector of the legal aid market across the branches of the legal profession, and this project has generated new insights into the workings of the market.

Jo Wilding

Jo set out to examine the ‘supply side’ of the market, including solicitors and barristers, asking whether quality and financial viability can be reconciled in the current market-based system. For her PhD, she conducted a case study of the publicly funded immigration bar, two private firms, three not-for-profit organisations and practitioners that are peer-identified as high quality.

After receiving funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, she turned her findings into a report with a policy focus, collaborating with other organisations in drafting a set of policy recommendations.

Jo found that due to imbalanced funding of asylum legal aid, “The publicly funded immigration bar is heavily dependent on the goodwill of a small number of high earners who do not do legal aid work themselves but keep their chambers financially afloat.

“High-quality practitioners lose money on every standard fee legal aid case they do. That means they reduce their market share.

“What that means is that demand goes unmet in both the droughts and the deserts, as the market mechanism is failing to ensure either availability or quality of services.”

The report will be available on 12 June but advance copies can be obtained from j.wilding@brighton.ac.uk.

Places at the launch event on 12 June (2pm-6:30) can be reserved online from Garden Court Chambers.